Plan not for the people you reach, but the people that they reach

02/01/2012

Playground Sessions Comms Plan

It's been awhile since I have blogged. I'm going to try to do this more often here and on the BBH Labs blog. When I started at BBH I was asked to be the Marketing Director on Playground Sessions, a software that BBH was building in their brand invention unit called ZAG. I created a Comms Plan that changed a few times during the course of the year but we finally executed it in November 2011 and I wanted to share it with my readers here.

The Comms Plan (including 3 comms tasks):

Prior to Launch Comms Task: Be SocialTo be social we needed to have platforms where people could follow and engage with the brand. We first set up a “Coming Soon” website using Weebly and MailChimp to capture emails. Today I would use LaunchRock which makes it even easier. We then established a User Voice account to engage the fans to help determine the types of songs that we secured from the record labels. We started our social presence and grew these communities organically over the first 10 months with Facebook (3000 Likes) and Twitter (700 Followers). It was a good start with our initial Beta testers. Our Social Media team used Sysomos and Shoutlet for monitoring, engagement and tracking.

Launch Comms Task: Be FascinatingThis was about putting a relevant message in front of a relevant audience using the fascination triggers of Power and Prestige. We worked with Twitter to get our account verifed. The week before launch we started advertising on Google with Ad Words and Twitter with Promoted Accounts. We grew our Twitter following to over 6000 leading up to the launch date. On November 3rd, 2011 we worked with YouTube to seed a special announcement video for David Sides fans and integrated annotations into the video. You can see that here:

Today we have over 13,000 Twitter Followers, over 9,000 Facebook Followers. We have had hundreds of people install the software on their computers and are excited about the future press and partnership deals that we are working on.

Comments

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This is smart marketing but, how is it anything more than well-disciplined media coordination? I struggle to see the new idea within your term "Propagation Planning". Sorry but it seems like esoteric jargon that looks to seem different for self-promotions sake. It doesn't describe anything new. Coordinated media efforts to get people to recommend products and services has been what marketing is all about. It is the fundamental aspect of marketing. New technology to help make that possible in new ways does not seem to earn a new fundamental that replaces standard practice. As planners, we already get labeled pretentious assholes, why would we want to invent jargon to reinforce that aspect. I am aware BBH is probably trying to seem differentiated and I'm sure they are considered that by some but I think I am going to hold off on using this jargon. It would be like a waiter trying to convince me his restaurant is the best dining experience because they have discovered eating is best experienced with their discovery of "pronged gustatory implements" when all he is describing is a fork.

Chuck, thanks for being a real person and not a spam bot and your challenge is valid. I agree that this is not our best "Propagation Planning" case study, in fact... I'm going to change the title of this post from Propagation Plan to Comms Plan because that is what it was. The point of this was to show a disciplined roll-out of a campaign instead of everything hitting at once.

The best case study we have is the Oasis Dig Out Your Soul in the Streets case study. This is where we trained street performers to carry our message to their audiences. It was truly planning not for the people you reach, but the people that they reach.

The best case study we have is the Oasis Dig Out Your Soul in the Streets case study. This is where we trained street performers to carry our message to their audiences. It was truly planning not for the people you reach, but the people that they reach.